Now a family-friendly ’hood: Crossing the street near Battery Park. Photo: Reuters

It’s great news to most New Yorkers that the Wall Street area has become one of the city’s best places to live — evidenced by a Financial District population that’s nearly doubled to 57,000 since 1999 and will soon hit 60,000.

Just about every apartment that comes to market is swiftly snatched up. People love the new FiDi — anchored by the country’s healthiest office market, now also throbbing with families, shops and amenities.

It’s so popular that the rental apartment vacancy rate is below 1 percent.

But to “tenant advocate” reactionaries, the picture is bleak.

Why? Well, tenants there won’t fight to have their market-priced apartments rent-stabilized.

Paul Newell, a Democratic district leader who is trying to inflict rent-stabilization on thousands more apartments downtown, whined to The Wall Street Journal last week that a mere 10 residents responded to his campaign.

Stabilization, the ruinous residue of World War II-era “emergency” rent-control law, to this day warps the city’s housing scene by keeping 1 million apartments effectively off the market — sometimes for decades.

A 2010 court ruling left some 5,000 more downtown units potentially subject to stabilization (on technical grounds involving landlord receipt of a tax benefit). But to win stabilized status, tenants must prove an “overcharge” to the state Department of Homes and Community Renewal or sue their landlord.

Newell, a leftist activist who sued the NYPD over “illegal” arrests (including his own) involving Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park takeover, is dismayed that FiDi residents haven’t taken up the rent cause in droves.

To explain it away, he absurdly claims the area is full of short-term residents who just have no interest in trying to reduce rents long term. Community Board 1 member Tom Goodkind echoed him, “Our area has always been quite transient,” and lamented, “We don’t want 15 college kids crashing in an apartment. We want people to hunker down and stay.”

Newell and Goodkind claim that people don’t stay long because it’s a lousy place to live lacking “basic trappings” like grocery stores.

Huh? What neighborhood are these guys talking about?

A 2009 poll by the Downtown Alliance found two-thirds of respondents had lived in the district for five years, and most intended to stay. More recent data from the Alliance show a median FiDi household income of $143,000 and average household income of $188,000. Some bunch of student drifters.

If FiDi were a transients’ camping ground, would Rose Associates spend a half-billion dollars to convert 70 Pine St. into a luxury address with 750 apartments at the highest rents in the area’s history?

Food shortage? The area’s proliferating choices range from huge new 55 Fulton Market to supermarkets to scores of gourmet shops.

Well, then — if it’s laughably false that residents want to bolt as soon as they can, why are they failing to fight for rent stabilization?

For one thing, the gap between market-rate and stabilized rents in the area is so small as to make the time and legal fees to seek stabilization not worth the struggle.

But there might well be a deeper explanation — anathema to activists who’d turn the clock back: